|
Join the RIPR Mailing List! For a weekly column and (a few) other items of interest, click here or send an email to ripr-list-subscribe@whatcheer.net. RIPR is a (paper) newsletter that looks at local, state and federal policy issues that affect life here in the Ocean State. Each issue focuses on particular policy areas of interest. Future issues will examine controversial aspects of environmental policy, health care, state tax reform, and education spending. The intention is to look at action rather than talk. RIPR also issues a weekly column about public policy, carried by ten of Rhode Island's finer newspapers. See here for an archive of recent columns. If you'd like to help, please contribute an item, suggest an issue topic, or buy a subscription. If you can, buy two or three (subscribe here). Search this siteAvailable Back Issues:
Subscription information:
Contact:For those of you who can read english and understand it, the following is an email address you are welcome to use. If you are a web bot, we hope you can't understand it, and that's the point of writing it this way. editor at whatcheer dot net Archive:
Links:Links pageRSSRIPR is primarily a print publication (yikes! how 20th century!), and the work it represents is supported by its subscribers. Feel free to use this link to an RSS feed for the blog, but the real meat is in the newsletter, so come back and subscribe when you have a chance. Responsibility: Tom Sgouros
|
Sun, 04 Jan 2009
The X axis is the ratio of median rents to median incomes, and the Y axis is the change in public school enrollment between 2004 and 2008. The line is fitted to the points using a simple least-squares method. For them who are interested, the slope of the line is good to about the 99% significance, while the intercept is only good to the 95% level. (See below.)
13:27 - 04 Jan 2009 [/y9/ja] link
Census Numbers: What Do They Mean?
Right before Christmas, the Census Bureau published its estimates for state population changes as of July 2008. The news wasn't great for Rhode Island, which is along with Michigan, one of only two states to lose population between 2007 and 2008. You can bet that this will provoke the usual round of teeth-gnashing, I am sure, and since most of the usual teeth-gnashers find everything to be a reason to cut taxes on rich people, you can bet that's coming, too.
But what is the story behind these numbers? Is it worth inquiring further about what they really mean? Your answer to this question will depends on whether you really want to solve problems, or whether you just enjoy complaining about stuff. I am interested in solutions, so I peeked, and this is some of what I found.
13:27 - 04 Jan 2009 [/y9/cols] link
Sat, 27 Dec 2008
How much does it cost to live in Rhode Island? That's a hard question to answer, so here's another: how much do you have to earn so that you're not poor in Rhode Island?
Since it was first developed (by Mollie Orshansky, a researcher at the Social Security Administration, in 1963), the federal poverty level has been controversial, subject to misinterpretation and manipulation. Originally based on typical food budgets, the poverty level has crept up with food prices over the years, but not with the changes in the way we spend money, leaving it a poor measure of being poor.
14:09 - 27 Dec 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Sat, 20 Dec 2008
I got a press release last week from the Governor's office. It seems that he's organized what they're calling a small business stimulus package. Well that's the kind of thing we need right now, so I clicked right over and looked for the details.
Sadly, what was on offer was something else entirely: a package of measures intended to make it more likely that Rhode Island businesses who need credit will get it. Apparently the Governor's office organized a bunch of local banks to pledge specific dollar amounts in local business credit and a variety of other ways to get credit to small businesses. This is a good thing, and I'm glad it's happening. The measures, all told, are cheap ways to use the government's power to get things to happen. Credit is the life blood of many businesses, and current events in the financial markets have jeopardized it, even for businesses in no danger of default.
But what of this word, "stimulus?" I'm afraid it's become a little overused, sort of cheapened by wide use this year. What is stimulus?
15:57 - 20 Dec 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Sun, 14 Dec 2008
Last week the Governor's "Blue-Ribbon Panel on Transportation Funding" issued its draft report about how we're supposed to pay for rebuilding our roads and bridges. The report says we need $639 million a year to rebuild our roads and bridges and to put RIPTA on a solid footing over the next ten years. This is about $285 million more than is going to come from the federal government or the existing array of taxes. This is a lot of money, even in these days of hundred-billion-dollar bailouts. It's enough dollar bills to blanket our sections of I-95 and 295 with them, including the breakdown lanes and bridge abutments.
The report isn't shy about revenue, which is a refreshing change -- not because I welcome paying more money, but because I welcome honesty from my public officials. It suggests a variety of tolls, taxes and fees to pay for the maintenance and reconstruction of what we've got. More about them in a moment.
The report recommendations are separated into the more frugal "Scenario 1" and the more expensive "Scenario 2". I gather that the intent is that we find some happy compromise between the two, but as I perused the report and its findings, I found it hard to imagine finding contentment anywhere between these two.
15:01 - 14 Dec 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Sat, 06 Dec 2008
Missed today's mail pickup, so it will be in Monday's.
- Housing First, a new approach to homelessness (that appears to be working), by Eric Hirsch
- A look at the proposed ALCO TIF deal, by Judith Reilly
- Book review: You Can't Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America by John MacArthur
Didn't you mean to subscribe already?
18:30 - 06 Dec 2008 [/y8/de] link
Affordable housing is still a problem
I was looking over some data about homelessness last week. It seems that the number of homeless people using shelters from July 2006 to June 2007 was about the same as the year, before, which seems like good news only until you compare it to the years before that. Shelter nights in 2006-2007 were up over 70% from 2000. The most recent year's data is still being compiled, but with unemployment up and rents not down, there's no obvious reason to think things have improved.
Homelessness is a complicated thing, with many reasons behind it, but high rents are a principal cause. Right now, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is about four times what a disabled person receiving Social Security (SSI) support receives. Sure, those people aren't necessarily shopping for median apartments, but show me the units that rent for $200 a month, which is about what they can afford. And that isn't the only problem.
18:26 - 06 Dec 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Mon, 01 Dec 2008
Via a friend, here's a provocative look at the Jevons paradox. What's that? It's the propensity for the economy to use more of a resource once the consumption of that resource is made more efficient. For example, when James Watt made steam engines more efficient, consumption of coal in 19th century Britain went up, not down, because the efficiency gains were offset by increased use. To draw out a comparison that should be obvious, there is no real reason to expect that the development of green technologies alone will inevitably lead to a cleaner and cooler planet.
Along with the Jevons paradox, there is this other economics sucker bet that says that long-term the price of oil is not going to go up. That is, the history of pretty much every commodity out there is that long-term, the price declines. Now oil plays such a central part in the economy that it might be the first commodity to break the rule, so I wouldn't go too far out on a limb with this, but what it tells me is that the people who say our salvation will be that peak oil will mean a rising price of oil which then provokes increasing use of green technologies which will then reduce warming and pollution are probably wrong in multiple ways.
We're not going to get a cooler planet without green technology, but we're also not going to get it if we rely only on technology to save us.
09:17 - 01 Dec 2008 [/y8/de] link
Sat, 29 Nov 2008
Last week I attended the monthly Geek Dinner at AS220 in Providence, a regular get-together for anyone interested in Rhode Island's tech industry. I got there early enough to get a seat and sat at a table with a guy who runs a database business and who is thinking about a new venture that -- well it would be unkind to describe his business idea, since I was talking to him as a fellow geek, not as a reporter. But it was great, and I would buy it, so I hope he goes ahead with it.
The evening's speakers were from DandyID.org, and they have a proposal for unifying your online identities across different services, so that your Facebook identity matches you on Amazon and Twitter, too, along with about 150 others. This way, your friends on one service can find you on another, and you can save having to maintain all these separate identities. It's an interesting niche, but what caught my attention is the three partners just moved their company here from Boulder, Colorado, a place I'm more accustomed to hearing about moving companies to.
I spoke with Sara Czyzewicz, one of DandyID's three partners and she told me that Boulder is oversaturated with startups, which makes it hard to get actual employees, and it's quite expensive to get space. They toured places like Seattle and San Francisco last year, looking to move. They added Providence to their list, and were quite surprised when they got here. (Sara is originally from Pawtucket though her partners are not.) She said they were attracted by affordable office space, but also by events like the Geek Dinners, and efforts like RI Nexus which show off the active community of technologists and inventors they found here. Since arriving in August, they've settled down to their new routine, and have found themselves a new programmer, too.
14:54 - 29 Nov 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Mon, 24 Nov 2008
I don't completely understand the details behind the idea that we are going to make $7.4 trillion available, but I understand a couple of things about it:
- There was no plan for the $700 billion, and so the half of it that was spent was essentially wasted. It allowed Wells Fargo to buy Wachovia on our dime (which may have contributed to Citigroup's stock price collapse), and it allowed some AIG executives to party on. What else? Where we did wind up owning things, we did it on terms that do not allow us any control.
- Not only is the crisis the result of having infantile ideologues mind the store — people who never saw a market they didn't want to deregulate — but they have completely screwed up the rescue effort, too.
What a country.
10:37 - 24 Nov 2008 [/y8/no] link
Sat, 22 Nov 2008
The state budget chickens are coming home to roost. After five years of self-inflicted fiscal crises, we finally have a real one, and your state is pretty much helpless. You might remember all the fuss last spring about closing a $400 million deficit in this year's budget. That was the manufactured crisis, created by years of ill-advised tax cuts, deferred maintenance and a refusal to raise enough money to pay our bills.
But now we face a real crisis. Last week the Revenue Estimator Conference met and agreed that we're going to be short around $233 million from what was estimated last May. We're also spending more, for nursing home care, RIte Care, DCYF and other services. The Governor's office says the overspending plus the shortfall totals $372 million, though I expect that number to change.
21:41 - 22 Nov 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Fri, 21 Nov 2008
Did you know that our state taxes are below the national average? Did you know that this fun fact comes via the Tax Foundation, whose crazy methodology exaggerates the impact of our income tax? Don't believe me; check it out for yourself.
For once, I wish we could have a debate in this state about the reality of taxes, without getting all tangled up in the bizarre civic self-loathing our policy makers suffer from.
23:39 - 21 Nov 2008 [/y8/no] link
Fri, 14 Nov 2008
In War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy created an absorbing story about how individual actors created the events that shaped European history, but how none of them were ever knew what was going on when they did. Napoleon won battles during which no one followed (or even received) his orders, and yet was credited with strategic genius for those victories. Weather and disease lost other battles (and the war) and Napoleon got the blame. In Tolstoy's view, the sweep of history is nothing more than the story of individuals blundering about, doing the best they can with their limited views of circumstances, and grand generalizations about it all are just hot air.
The opinion pages of our state's newspapers are routinely filled with exactly these kinds of grand generalizations, facile words describing how our state's politics can be explained because voters have "chosen" the status quo, or "refuse" change because they re-elected so many members of the General Assembly.
I'm with Tolstoy on this: it's silly to encase the individual acts of hundreds of thousands of people in some kind of frozen metaphor like "the people want..." It doesn't explain anything and besides, in our government, "the people" have no way to express "their" opinion. If you are reading this, you probably have opinions about how the state would be best served. When you were in the voting booth last week, did you feel that any of the choices on offer represented your opinions well? The fate of our state deserves at least an essay question, but elections are multiple choice tests. Actually, given how many candidates run unopposed, many elections are True/False tests, where you're not allowed to check "False."
So, given all that, can we learn anything from the state election results of last week? Studying the results, the best I could come up with was this: when given the option, voters often seemed to prefer new faces, but not Republicans. Where elections were about policy issues, progressive views seemed to prevail. Mostly.
23:24 - 14 Nov 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Sat, 08 Nov 2008
I had to write this column last week, and my crystal ball was cloudy, so not a word about the election today, but in the spirit of changes afoot, I have a couple of pieces of good news worth sharing -- your government succeeding by doing interesting and creative things.
The first concerns the state bond sale of a couple of weeks ago. This was when Treasurer Frank Caprio arranged to sell bonds to the public. Here's what happened.
10:09 - 08 Nov 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Wed, 05 Nov 2008
07:09 - 05 Nov 2008 [/y8/no] link
Sat, 01 Nov 2008
A friend passed along a fascinating perspective on the bailout by an executive at a big bank, here. See especially comment number 56, which is a rebuttal of a number of the comments, from the original emailer.
09:39 - 01 Nov 2008 [/y8/no] link
Fri, 31 Oct 2008
Here's a funny endorsement:
As anyone in academia will know, a thoughtful and professorial air is not in itself a recommendation for executive power. But a commitment to seeking good advice and taking seriously the findings of disinterested enquiry seems an attractive attribute for a chief executive. It certainly matters more than any specific pledge to fund some particular agency or initiative at a certain level — pledges of a sort now largely rendered moot by the unpredictable flux of the economy.This journal does not have a vote, and does not claim any particular standing from which to instruct those who do. But if it did, it would cast its vote for Barack Obama.
Well, not that funny an endorsement, but a funny source: Nature, one of the two most prestigious journals of science in the world.
Ads and the like:
